Submitted 1 day ago by sunzu2@thebrainbin.org to selfhosted@lemmy.world
https://thebrainbin.org/m/selfhosted@lemmy.world/t/390279
Need to expand local storage for local media streaming. Running a regular desktop on linux.
I am willing to spend money on "the best" for streaming purpose while and hopefully something I can keep reusing down the road if it lasts.
I would get a recertified enterprise drive from Server Part Deals. Drives in the 12-18TB range currently have the best price per TB. Be sure to get a SATA drive if it’s going in a desktop.
Fully agree.
I’ve purchased refurb drives from both them and GoHardDrive.com. So far I’m 5/5 for a mix of Exos and HGST Ultrastar drives working perfectly out of the box.
Anytime these drives pop up on Slickdeals, the thread is full of 3 types of people: People who have never bought a refurb/recert drive but insist they are all going to burn your house down, people who have bought several with no issue, and people who have received a failing drive that the seller promptly replaced.
Thanks for this.
I just grabbed a pair of 18TB Seagate Exos SATA drives - surprisingly quiet for what they are.
Last time someone mentioned these on Lemmy I got one.
It “crashed” according to Synology in about a week.
Was the drive scanned for errors before installing it? I’ve been running 2x8TB drives for about 1.5 years. If a drive fails, it is better to find out earlier while they are within warranty.
Whatever you get, get at least two and do RAID1/5/6. They will break.
Speed shouldn’t be an issue for streaming media.
I don’t know if I’m alone on this, but I just bought the biggest, fairly inexpensive 5400rpm hdd that was in my price range when I set up. Might notice the slower speed when doing a big data dump, but for streaming purposes you can run many 4k streams concurrently and the bottleneck would probably be your network speed before you hit a drive read bottleneck.
Second this. What you need for high quality media is space, not speed. For any single stream, network and drive will be fast enough anyway. Your typical HDD offers like 4-6 times the bandwidth that a regular Blu-ray can provide. You can get 8TB HDDs for the price of 2TB SSDs. Random access doesn’t matter for that application.
You might want to invest in redundancy and use a RAID 1 or RAID 10 array, depends on how valuable that media is to you or how long it would take to recover in case it’s lost. A simple solution would be a btrfs software RAID, in case your are after something like a Linux home media server with Jellyfin.
Does no one care about power consumption? Mechanical disks use, in my experience, 7-15w all day all the time just idling. If you live in a high energy cost area the ROI on going SSD can be as low as 3-4 years. If you can afford it, splurge for SSD. I spent ~$800 on two 8tb SSDs and I’m very happy with the choice.
If you live in a high energy cost area the ROI on going SSD can be as low as 3-4 years
~$800 on two 8tb SSDs
2 x 8tb HDDs is roughly $200USD
I don’t know what kind of electricity prices you’re paying, but to hit a 3 year ROI on your SSDs, you’re paying at least $1.5USD/kWh, assuming the full 15W consumption of the HDDs and assuming negligible power.consumption from the SSDs.
When I bought them 2 years ago power in MA was $0.46 per kWh, this included transmission costs and all the other fees. 15W cost me $4.80 a month, so $57.6 a year and $230 over 4 years. At the time 14TB mechanical disks were about $300 so it was about a $270 ‘premium’ for solid state over mechanical so I exaggerated the ROI, but to me the 2x price premium was worth it for silence and no latency on retrieving my data. So in summary the ROI for me was more like 8 years, ignoring the many advantages of SSD.
Power costs would have to be bonkers for it to matter.
8TB NAS HDDs are <$200, so even if it uses 15W vs 3W, that’s 12W difference, or 8-9kWh/month. If you pay a ridiculous $0.40/kWh, that’s $40/year. That means the SSDs would pay for themselves after ~15 years, and I’m guessing you’d replace/upgrade them long before then.
But NAS drives use a lot less than 15W, usually around 4-6W idle. So the payoff period is probably closer to 30 years…
My SSDs use negligible power at idle, I only noticed a 1w increase when I installed two. Almost ‘free’. Also your 0.14kwh is almost certainly just the cost to generate the power minus the delivery fees. Where I live the delivery fees double my true per kWh cost. Double check your bill and divide your monthly consumption by your monthly payment to find the real cost.
That really depends. If you’ll eventually get a NAS, I recommend a NAS HDD because they do better with 24/7 operation. They also use a bit less power than desktop HDDs (which you shouldn’t get anyway, just get an SSD for your desktop/laptop), if you care about that.
I use two WD Red HDDs in my NAS (just an old desktop PC), and I’ve had Hitachi in the past. I use SSDs exclusively for my gaming desktop and laptop though, because performance is a lot more important than cost.
There isn’t one.
Stick to the best brands out there that have been benchmarked.
AbidanYre@lemmy.world 1 day ago
It probably doesn’t matter at the scale you’ll be operating. But Backblaze has more data than anyone here about reliability.
backblaze.com/…/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q3-2024…
nicgentile@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Used to run over 40 drives. Backblaze pointed out those Toshiba’s. Man they do not die.
Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Had (and probably have it somewhere) a 2TB Toshiba drive for +5 years in my desktop as a games and programs data grave. Never once had an issue.
My current NAS drives are also Toshiba helium filled drives and though loud are okayish under light read operations.